Quantifying Effort in American Football

Emily Shteynberg, Luke Snavely, Sheryl Solorzano

Introduction:

  • Quantifying effort for running backs from the NFL 2022 season

  • Why is this important?

    • Traditional stats miss the “how” behind play values such as yards gained, expected added points, etc.
    • Evaluating running backs’ effort and performance

Data: 2022 NFL Season

  • Data description
    • Game, play, player, tracking data from Weeks 1-9 [^1]
    • Running plays where a running back (RB) is the ball carrier
    • Trimmed each play to frames between handoff and end of play
  • Relevant data pre-processing steps
    • Fatigue (back up vs starting running backs)

Plan of Action

Completed Steps